Lust, betrayal and a Dickens of a performance from Ralph Fiennes at his finest

The Invisible Woman ★★★★★

Think of Charles Dickens and many of us
picture a Victorian gentleman in top hat and frock coat, bewhiskered of
chin, fruity of voice and extravagant of vocabulary.

The Dickens that
Ralph Fiennes delivers in his impressive new film, The Invisible Woman,
is all those things but he’s also a more human and infinitely more
fallible figure.

This is not a Dickens who spends his
entire life recounting A Christmas Carol in front of a roaring hearth
while taking the occasional sip from a glass of port.

Ralph Fiennes is excellent in The Invisible Woman - delivering both the charm, charisma and showmanship we expect and the flaws and the weaknesses we do not

No, this is a
Dickens who cheats on his wife, is capable of astonishing cruelty and
has a fondness for much younger women, or at least one much younger
woman.

For when the great author met the young actress who was to become
both his muse and mistress, Nelly Ternan was just 18. Dickens was 45.

Mindful of modern sensitivities,
perhaps, Fiennes, who directs as well as stars, and Abi Morgan, who has
adapted the screenplay from Claire Tomalin’s book, blur this point
slightly as we move from our atmospheric starting point in the Margate
of the 1880s back to the moment when the pair first meet in Manchester.

‘Some years earlier’ is all the caption says. Hmm, it was actually a
quarter of a century earlier.

Dickens is putting on a play with that
other literary giant, Wilkie Collins, and Nelly, one of three theatrical
sisters, is there to play a small part.

Her voice is too quiet but she
has an honesty and sincerity that, along with her undeniable prettiness,
quietly catches his eye.

When Charles Dickens met the young actress who was to become both his muse and mistress, Nelly Ternan (played by Felicity Jones, pictured right) was just 18. Dickens was 45

‘She has something,’ the great man muses to
himself, Dickensian for ‘Phwoar!’

Dickens is entranced; Nelly, played by
the ever more highly regarded Felicity Jones, is oblivious, while her
protective mother, played with beautiful restraint by Kristin Scott
Thomas, is quietly concerned.

‘My daughters are fine young women,’ she
tells him, ‘but sometimes I worry about their future.’

She seems to be
dropping a hint, but when Dickens offers a sincere-sounding offer of
help, she is appalled. Victorian morality, we are reminded, is a complex
thing.

By now, it’s also becoming clear what a
cleverly crafted and well-acted production this is, with Rob Hardy’s
beautifully lingering camerawork and a gentle pace contributing to the
wistful mood every bit as much as the performances.

Dickens is entranced; Nelly is oblivious, while her protective mother, played with beautiful restraint by Kristin Scott Thomas, is quietly concerned

There’s nothing new about the use of a
long flashback to tell a story, but Morgan dallies long enough at the
start –when we see Nelly as a married but unhappy schoolmistress who
admits only to having known Dickens as a child – for the jump back to
the past to be imbued with a sadness and poignancy that brings to mind
one of my favourite films, The Go-Between.

IT'S A FACT

Dickens and Nelly were involved in the Staplehurst rail crash in June 1865. The author tended the dying and was severely affected by the disaster. He died five years to the day after the crash.

It’s extraordinary to see their
relationship (for a long time, a chaste one) develop almost without the
innocent Nelly even noticing.

But Dickens becomes ever more direct, at
one point forcing his long-suffering wife, Catherine – mother to his ten
children – to hand-deliver a brooch that he has bought for Nelly’s
birthday but which has been delivered to his wife by accident.

Later we see Catherine being almost
bricked up as a carpenter arrives presumably to separate their living
quarters.

Dickens will later announce his ‘amicable’ separation from her
in a pompous letter to The Times. And still, at least according to this
retelling, he has not slept with Nelly...

In an effort to hurry that moment along,
he takes her to see Collins – played with well-judged understatement by
Tom Hollander – who lives with, but is not married to, the widowed
Caroline Graves.

Nelly is furious at being put in a position that
apparently condones their immoral relationship.

‘I did not realise I was
to be your whore.’

‘Kept woman’ is probably a better description of the
arrangement they eventually come to.

Fiennes is excellent – delivering both the charm, charisma and showmanship we expect and the flaws and the weaknesses we do not.

This may be a Dickens in his creative prime but it’s also a Dickens enslaved by his ego, dazzled by his own public persona.

‘It’s who I am,’ he says, oozing false modesty.

Jones lights up every scene she is in, and somehow manages to endow Nelly with a combination of delicacy and inner steel that is both convincing and winning.

Pedants will say that she looks too young in the scenes set in the 1880s, but what they may not know is that in her second life, Nelly, by then Mrs Wharton Robinson, knocked more than ten years off her real age so that the time she’d spent as Dickens’s ‘invisible woman’ conveniently disappeared.

Thank heavens her remarkable story didn’t disappear with them.

SECONDSCREEN

Dallas Buyers Club★★★★★Mr Peabody & Sherman★★★★★RoboCop★★★★★

Dallas Buyers Club: Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto stand real chances of success in the Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor categories respectively

Dallas Buyers Club is the last of this year’s Oscar contenders to arrive in our cinemas and it’s all about the acting, with Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto standing real chances of success in the Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor categories respectively.

But just telling you that McConaughey lost 47 lb to play the part of Ron Woodroof, the redneck Texan electrician who discovered he had AIDS in the early terrifying days of the disease, while Leto shaved off his eyebrows to convince as Rayon, a pre-operative transsexual, also exposes the film’s weakness: it all feels dated.

McConaughey, however, currently in the form of his career, is outstanding as the tough oilfield worker who, when given just 30 days to live by his doctors, reacts with homophobic fury, but then cleans up his life and begins to do his scientific research.

And what he discovers is that ‘wonder-drug’ AZT isn’t as effective as it’s cracked up to be, prompting him to join forces with a doctor based in Mexico to import an unproven mix of proteins, vitamins and minerals. When this cocktail starts to keep him alive… well, everyone with HIV in Texas wants in on the illegally imported action.

We’re never quite sure how Woodroof became infected – Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallée keeps it blurrily vague – and his journey from bigotry to tolerance does feel a little formulaic, but the performances and the stark reminder of those extraordinary, frightening times make it worth catching.

Ever since Toy Story and Shrek, we’ve become accustomed to children’s films that work for adults too. Mr Peabody & Sherman takes this to the next level – becoming the first children’s film that adults will probably enjoy more than their offspring.

Inspired by a 1960s cartoon, it’s the story of a super-smart dog, Peabody, who prefers reading Plato to sniffing other dogs, and his adopted human son, Sherman.

The 3D animation from Dreamworks is excellent, the voice cast led by Ty Burrell (Phil in TV’s Modern Family) is spot-on, but it’s the clever gags that make this silliness a hoot.

The remake of Judge Dredd was one of the unexpected treats of 2012 but the remake of RoboCop already has to go down as one of the big disappointments of 2014.

With Joel Kinnaman under-powered as Detroit-cop-turned-cyborg Alex Murphy, the result – despite a supporting cast led by Gary Oldman – is a violent, badly-written and notably unfunny mess.